Citation

Killian C, Thomas EM. J. Appl. Soc. Sci. 2020; 14(1): 5-22.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1936724419898885

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article focuses on the recent resurgence of concerns regarding fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warning even women not trying to conceive to abstain from alcohol completely if not using contraceptives, and a medical article covered by the New York Times that claims that rates of FAS are much higher than previously thought, have reignited anxiety over FAS, even though there remains substantial gray area in the relationship between alcohol and pregnancy outcomes. Not only is there scant evidence that less than a drink a day affects offspring, and none that an occasional drink during pregnancy has any effect, even among alcoholic women, FAS is more than 10 times more likely to strike the children of poor alcoholics than those of higher means who drink excessively. We explore why researchers, physicians, and public health officials continue to hyperbolize the effects of drinking alcohol leading to recommendations that target not just alcoholic women, but all women, pregnant or not. Building on past authors' suspicion of previous overblown cautioning about FAS, we do in-depth tracing of the bibliographic lineage of these warnings, highlighting the problems with the medical researchers' and health agencies' recommendations including extending the scope of the problem and relying on misleading statistics. We argue that while policing women's bodies to insure compliance with "proper" feminine behavior is an ongoing phenomenon, these new attacks on women's autonomy veiled in scientific language must be unmasked and challenged.

Language: en